One of the philosophers answered him that he might indeed believe that there were intelligent creatures smaller than man, and he related for his benefit not the fables which Virgil told about the bees, but all that Swammerdam discovered and Réaumur dissected. He made him understand in short, that there are animals which to the bee are what the bee is to man, what the Sirian himself was to the prodigious animals he had mentioned, and what these animals are to other things compared with which they seem but atoms.
By degrees the conversation became interesting, and Micromegas spoke as follows:
CHAPTER VII
Conversation with the Men
“O intelligent atoms in whom the Eternal Being has been pleased to manifest His dexterity and His might, the joys you taste on your globe are doubtless very pure, for as you are so immaterial, and seem to be all spirit, your lives must be passed in Love and in Thought: that, indeed, is the true life of spirits. Nowhere yet have I found real happiness, but that you have it here I cannot doubt.”
At these words all the philosophers shook their heads and one of them, more frank than the rest, candidly admitted that, apart from a small number of people who were little esteemed, the rest of the inhabitants of the world were a crowd of madmen, miscreants, and unfortunates. “If evil be a property of matter,” he said, “we have more matter than is necessary for the doing of much evil, and too much spirit if evil be a property of the spirit. Do you realize, for instance, that at this moment there are a hundred thousand madmen of our species wearing hats killing, or being killed by, a hundred thousand other animals wearing turbans, and that over almost all the face of the earth this has been the custom from time immemorial?”
The Sirian shuddered and asked what could be the ground for these horrible quarrels between such puny beasts.
“The matter at issue,” replied the philosopher, “is some mud-heap as large as your heel. It is not that any single man of all these millions who slaughter each other claims one straw on the mud-heap. The point is—shall the mud-heap belong to a certain man called ‘Sultan’ or to another called, I know not why, ‘Caesar’? Neither of them has ever seen or will ever see the little bit of land in dispute, and barely one of these animals which slaughter each other has ever seen the animal for which he is slaughtered.”
“Wretch!” cried the Sirian indignantly. “Such a riot of mad fury is inconceivable! I am tempted to take three steps and with three blows of my foot to crush out of existence this anthill of absurd cut-throats.”
“Do not trouble,” answered the philosopher; “they wreak their own ruin. Know that after ten years not a hundredth part of these miscreants is ever left. Know that, even when they have not drawn the sword, hunger, exhaustion, or debauchery carries them nearly all off. Besides, it is not they who should be punished, but the stay-at-home barbarians who, after a good meal, order from their remote closets the massacre of a million men, and then have solemn prayers of gratitude for the event offered up to God.”
The traveler was stirred with pity for the little human race, in which he discovered such amazing contrasts. “Since you are of the small number of the wise,” he said to these gentlemen, “and that apparently you do not kill people for money, tell me, I pray, how you employ yourselves.”
“We dissect flies,” answered the philosopher, “we measure lines, we gather mathematical data. We agree on the two or three points we understand, and we argue about the two or three thousand we do not.”
Immediately a fancy took the Sirian and the Saturnian to question these thinking atoms, in order to find out on what things they were agreed. “What do you reckon to be the distance,” asked the latter, “between the Dog-star and Gemini?”
“Thirty-two and a half degrees,” they all replied in concert.
“And from here to the moon?”
“In round numbers, sixty times the radius of the earth.”
“What does your air weigh?” he continued, thinking to catch them. He did not succeed, however, for they all told him that the air weighs about nine hundred times less than an equal volume of the lightest water, and nineteen thousand times less than ducat gold. The little dwarf from Saturn, astounded at their replies, was tempted to take for sorcerers these same people to whom a quarter of an hour before he had refused a soul.
Finally, Micromegas put in a word. “Since you are so well acquainted with what is outside you,” he said, “you doubtless know still better what is inside. Tell me what your soul is, and how you form your ideas.”
As before, the philosophers replied in concert—but each held a different opinion. The oldest quoted Aristotle, another pronounced the name of Descartes, a third the name of Malebranche, a fourth that of Leibnitz, a fifth that of Locke. An aged Peripatetic said loudly and confidently: “ ‘The soul is an entelechy and a proof of its power to be what it is.’ That is what Aristotle states expressly, page 653 of the Louvre edition. ’Eντελέχεα ἐστí, etc.”
“I do not understand Greek too well,” remarked the giant.
“No more do I,” said the philosophical maggot.
“Why then,” asked the Sirian, “do you quote Aristotle in Greek?”
“Because,” replied the scholar, “one should always quote what one does not comprehend at all in the language one understands least.”
It was the Cartesian’s turn. “The soul,” he said, “is a pure spirit which has received in its mother’s womb all metaphysical ideas and which, on leaving it, has to go to school to learn over again what it knew so well, and will never know again.”
“It was not worth while,” observed the animal eight leagues long, “for your soul to be so wise in your mother’s womb if it had to become so ignorant by the time your chin could grow a beard. But what do you mean by a spirit?”
“What a question!” said the man of abstractions. “I have not the remotest idea. A spirit, it is said, is not matter.”
“But do you know at least what matter is?”
“Very well,” replied the man. “For example, this stone is gray, has a certain shape and three dimensions, is heavy and divisible.”
“Well,” said the Sirian, “this thing which appears to you to be divisible, heavy and gray, will you kindly tell me what it is? You perceive some of its attributes, but do you know what it is fundamentally?”
“No,” answered the other.
“Then you do not know at all what matter is.”
Mr. Micromegas then asked another of the wise men he held on his thumb what his soul was, and what it did.
“Nothing at all,” replied the disciple of Malebranche. “God does everything for me. I see everything in Him, I do everything in Him. It is He who does everything without my interfering.”
“It would be as well worth while not to exist,” said the sage from Sirius. “And you, my friend,” he continued to a Leibnitzian who was there, “what is your soul?”
“My soul,” answered the Leibnitzian, “is a hand which points the hours while my body ticks: or, if you prefer it, it is my soul which ticks while my body points the hour: or again, my soul is the mirror of the universe, and my body is the frame of the mirror. That is quite clear.”
A humble partisan of Locke stood nearby, and when he was spoken to at last, replied: “I do not know how I think, but I do know that I have never thought save by virtue of my senses. That there are immaterial and intelligent beings I do not doubt: but that it is impossible for God to endow matter with mind I doubt very much. I hold the power of God in veneration: I am not free to set bounds to it: I predicate nothing: I am content to believe that more things are possible than we think.”
The animal from Sirius smiled. He did not think the last speaker the least wise. The dwarf from Saturn would have embraced the follower of Locke had it not been for the difference in their proportions.
But, unluckily, there was present a minute animalcule in a clerical hat who interrupted the other animalcule philosophers. He said he understood the whole mystery; that the explanatio
n was to be found in the Summa of St. Thomas. He looked the two celestial inhabitants up and down, and asserted that their persons, worlds, suns, and stars were created solely for man.
At this speech the two travelers fell on top of each other, suffocating with that inextinguishable laughter which, according to Homer, is the lot of the gods. Their shoulders and stomachs heaved, and amid these convulsions the ship which the Sirian held on his thumb fell into one of the Saturnian’s trousers pockets. These two good people tried to find it for a long time and, having recovered it at last, set everything very nicely in order. The Sirian picked the maggots up again and spoke to them once more with much kindness, although at the bottom of his heart he was rather angry that such infinitely small creatures should be possessed of an arrogance almost infinitely great. He promised to prepare for them a fine volume of philosophy, written very small so that they might be able to read it, and that in the volume they would find an explanation for everything. And to be sure, he did give them this book before he left them. They took it to Paris to the Academy of Science: but when the aged secretary opened it he found nothing but blank pages. “Ah!” said he. “I thought as much.”
Translation by H. I. Woolt
Story of a Good Brahmin
ON MY travels I met an old Brahmin, a very wise man, of marked intellect and great learning. Furthermore, he was rich and, consequently, all the wiser, because, lacking nothing, he needed to deceive nobody. His household was very well managed by three handsome women who set themselves out to please him. When he was not amusing himself with his women, he passed the time in philosophizing. Near his house, which was beautifully decorated and had charming gardens attached, there lived a narrow-minded old Indian woman: she was a simpleton, and rather poor.
Said the Brahmin to me one day: “I wish I had never been born!” On my asking why, he answered: “I have been studying forty years, and that is forty years wasted. I teach others and myself am ignorant of everything. Such a state of affairs fills my soul with so much humiliation and disgust that my life is intolerable. I was born in Time, I live in Time, and yet I do not know what Time is. I am at a point between two eternities, as our wise men say, and I have no conception of eternity. I am composed of matter: I think, but I have never been able to learn what produces my thought. I do not know whether or no my understanding is a simple faculty inside me, such as those of walking and digesting, and whether or no I think with my head as I grip with my hands. Not only is the cause of my thought unknown to me; the cause of my actions is equally a mystery. I do not know why I exist, and yet every day people ask me questions on all these points. I have to reply, and as I have nothing really worth saying I talk a great deal, and am ashamed of myself afterward for having talked.
“It is worse still when I am asked if Brahma was born of Vishnu or if they are both eternal. God is my witness that I have not the remotest idea, and my ignorance shows itself in my replies. ‘Ah, Holy One,’ people say to me, ‘tell us why evil pervades the earth.’ I am in as great a difficulty as those who ask me this question. Sometimes I tell them that everything is as well as can be, but those who have been ruined and broken in the wars do not believe a word of it—and no more do I. I retire to my home stricken at my own curiosity and ignorance. I read our ancient books, and they double my darkness. I talk to my companions: some answer me that we must enjoy life and make game of mankind; others think they know a lot and lose themselves in a maze of wild ideas. Everything increases my anguish. I am ready sometimes to despair when I think that after all my seeking I do not know whence I came, whither I go, what I am nor what I shall become.”
The good man’s condition really worried me. Nobody was more rational or more sincere than he. I perceived that his unhappiness increased in proportion as his understanding developed and his insight grew.
The same day I saw the old woman who lived near him. I asked her if she had ever been troubled by the thought that she was ignorant of the nature of her soul. She did not even understand my question. Never in all her life had she reflected for one single moment on one single point of all those which tormented the Brahmin. She believed with all her heart in the metamorphoses of Vishnu and, provided she could obtain a little Ganges water wherewith to wash herself, thought herself the happiest of women.
Struck with this mean creature’s happiness, I returned to my wretched philosopher. “Are you not ashamed,” said I, “to be unhappy when at your very door there lives an old automaton who thinks about nothing, and yet lives contentedly?”
“You are right,” he replied. “I have told myself a hundred times that I should be happy if I were as brainless as my neighbor, and yet I do not desire such happiness.”
My Brahmin’s answer impressed me more than all the rest. I set to examining myself, and I saw that in truth I would not care to be happy at the price of being a simpleton.
I put the matter before some philosophers, and they were of my opinion. “Nevertheless,” said I, “there is a tremendous contradiction in this mode of thought, for, after all, the problem is—how to be happy. What does it matter whether one has brains or not? Further, those who are contented with their lot are certain of their contentment, whereas those who reason are not certain that they reason correctly. It is quite clear, therefore,” I continued, “that we must choose not to have common sense, however little common sense may contribute to our discomfort.” Everyone agreed with me, but I found nobody, notwithstanding, who was willing to accept the bargain of becoming a simpleton in order to become contented. From which I conclude that if we consider the question of happiness we must consider still more the question of reason.
But on reflection it seems that to prefer reason to felicity is to be very senseless. How can this contradiction be explained? Like all the other contradictions. It is matter for much talk.
Translation by H. I. Woolt
Letters
Letters to Frederick the Great
Paris, 26th August, 1736.
MONSEIGNEUR,
I should indeed be insensitive were I not infinitely touched by the letter with which your Royal Highness has been graciously pleased to honor me. My self-love was but too flattered; but that love of the human race which has always existed in my heart and which I dare to say determines my character, gave me a pleasure a thousand times purer when I saw that the world holds a prince who thinks like a man, a philosophical prince who will make men happy.
Suffer me to tell you that there is no man on the earth who should not return thanks for the care you take in cultivating by sane philosophy a soul born to command. Be certain there have been no truly good kings except those who began like you, by educating themselves, by learning to know men, by loving the truth, by detesting persecution and superstition. Any prince who thinks in this way can bring back the golden age to his dominions. Why do so few kings seek out this advantage? You perceive the reason, Monseigneur; it is because almost all of them think more of royalty than of humanity: you do precisely the opposite. If the tumult of affairs and the malignancy of men do not in time alter so divine a character, you will be adored by your people and admired by the whole world. Philosophers worthy of that name will fly to your dominions; and, as celebrated artists crowd to that country where their art is most favored, men who think will press forward to surround your throne.
The illustrious Queen Christina left her kingdom to seek the arts; reign, Monseigneur, and let the arts come to seek you.
May you never be disgusted from the sciences by the quarrels of learned men! From those circumstances which you were graciously pleased to inform me of, Monseigneur, you see that most of them are men like courtiers themselves. They are sometimes as greedy, as intriguing, as treacherous, as cruel; and the only difference between the pests of the court and the pests of the school is that the latter are the more ridiculous.
It is very sad for humanity that those who term themselves the messengers of Heaven’s command, the interpreters of the Divinity, in a word theologians, are
sometimes the most dangerous of all; that some of them are as pernicious to society as they are obscure in their ideas and that their souls are inflated with bitterness and pride in proportion as they are empty of truths. For the sake of a sophism they would trouble the earth and would persuade all kings to avenge with fire and steel the honor of an argument in ferio or in barbara.
Every thinking being not of their opinion is an atheist; and every king who does not favor them will be damned. You know, Monseigneur, that the best one can do is to leave to themselves these pretended teachers and real enemies of the human race. Their words, when unheeded, are lost in the air like wind, but if the weight of authority is lent them, this wind acquires a force which sometimes overthrows the throne itself.
I see, Monseigneur, with the joy of a heart filled with love of the public weal, the immense distance you set between men who seek the truth in peace and those who would make war for words they do not understand. I see that Newton, Leibnitz, Bayle, Locke, those elevated minds, so enlightened, so gentle, have nourished your spirit and that you reject other pretended nourishment which you find poisoned or without substance.
I cannot sufficiently thank your Royal Highness for your kindness in sending me the little book about M. Wolff. I look upon his metaphysical ideas as things which do honor to the human mind. They are flashes in the midst of a dark night; and that, I think, is all we can hope of metaphysics. It seems improbable that the first principles of things will ever be thoroughly known. The mice living in a few little holes of an immense building do not know if the building is eternal, who is the architect, or why the architect built it. They try to preserve their lives, to people their holes, and to escape the destructive animals which pursue them. We are the mice; and the divine architect who built this universe has not yet, so far as I know, told His secret to any of us. If any man can pretend to have guessed accurately, it is M. Wolff. He may be combated, but he must be esteemed; his philosophy is far from being pernicious; is there anything more beautiful and more true than to say, as he does, that men should be just even if they were so unfortunate as to be atheists?
The Portable Voltaire (Portable Library) Page 40